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her ass shot off.
    “Romeo! You’ve got one on your six!” Volleyball’s voice cut in.
    “I’ve got him, Romeo!” his wingman Freak replied. “Guns, guns, guns.”
    “Look out Freak! You’ve got a couple of them starting to form up on you.” Romeo replied. “Jesus it’s thick out here.”
    “Got that right, Romeo. Damn AGs are like angry bees swarming and they ain’t sticking on their wingmen.” Golfbag added.
    Deuce didn’t like it. The enemy planes were using a knew tactic on them. They had more of a hive or swarm attack plan rather than the standard wingmen divide and conquer approach. They were outnumbered more than five to one and didn’t have a lot of room between themselves and the surface. They needed to mix it up more and somehow put the enemy at a disadvantage. On the upside thier attack had been successful. According to the DTM battleview it looked like all the bot fighters had turned their attention from the ground pounders and were now targeting the Saviors.
    “Alright Marines, we’ve gotten their attention.” Deuce announced. “Let’s pull them upward and away from the surface.”
    “They have us outnumbered, Deuce. You have a plan?” Lieutenant Colonel Connie “Skinny” Munk asked over the net. Deuce could see her longtime friend’s blue dot in the DTM view but couldn’t make out her fighter. It was below her and underneath her wing on the left side.
    Any Marine knew that when you were outnumbered you attacked. But what type of attack would be best. In the microsecond she had to consider her next move her mind was a flurry of memories of space battles and training sessions. She could only see one clear tactical approach and it didn’t make her happy.
    “Yes. We get these bot bastards up in the ball. On my signal I want A-group to start pukin’ while the B-group covers our ass on the backend.” Deuce ordered. She hated to go to the pukin’ deathblossom so soon into an engagement, but the numbers were too much in the enemy’s favor and that is what the maneuver was for.
    “Shit, I just ate,” Skinny said.
    “Well, Skinny,” her wingman Captain Michael “HoundDog” Samuels grunted. “At least you get to eat it again.”
    Deuce held her abdominal muscles clenched as she bit on the TMJ bite block. Her trajectory carried her upward at top speed away from the planetoid. Nearly fifty of the enemy fighters adjusted their flight paths all vectored toward hers. The red and blue flight lines intersection was predicted to be only a matter of seconds away.
    Purple tracer rounds zipped by her canopy and one them slammed into her empennage. The SIFs held but the mecha rocked violently. Deuce pulled back on the HOTAS and stomped the left inner pedal yawing the mecha around while keeping her flight path headed in the same direction. She was flying backwards with her DTM targeting system lighting up red on several targets.
    “Guns, guns, guns!” Deuce barrel rolled while still flying backwards and let loose a couple of missiles to give her some breathing room. “Fox Three! Fox Three!”
    The enemy fighters appeared to be flying in some sort of chaotic pattern. They hadn’t done that before. There was no wingman coverage as far as could be discerned. Deuce knew that for her plan to optimally effective they would have to get five of her squadron inside the swarm before they went to the whirling madness of the Pukin’ deathblossom algorithm.
    “These son of a bitches are swarming everywhere!” Beanhead shouted. “Guns, guns, guns.”
    The A-group pilots were pulling in on Deuce’s position slower than the bots but they were close enough. Deuce was damned near puking already from the rapid and wild evasives she was taking due to the erratic swarm’s attack tactics. The deathblossom was going to take a toll on her for a few precious seconds.
    For more than forty years the maneuver had been referred to as a “pukin’ deathblossom” from some ancient pop-culture reference and because